Fair Warning: This page is not intended to offend anyone, but as TMI means Too Much Information, some readers may want to go to a pleasanter page, such as the poetry.
I was born in Burbank, Calif., USA, across the street from Walt Disney Studios. It was 1958. After moving around a bit as an Army brat (Wertheim, Munich & Garmisch in Germany and Yuma, AZ, USA), my family settled in Laguna Beach, California in 1964. It was the hip Art Colony and liberal island in conservative Orange County. My parents were proponents of Tolerance and Thinking-for-Oneself long before it was fashionable. My name wasn't Die Löwin yet. (Nope, I'm not telling what it was. Anyone who recognizes the story will know.)
I grew up with a world of strange expectations due to my rich fantasy life. My paternal grandmother called me her "Little Princess", so I worked out the scenario: Oma was the deposed Queen of an obscure independant German principality, her husband who had been King was kidnapped and probably offed. My father would then be the Prince in Waiting who had married That Woman (Oma didn't like Mom.) and I was the Princess, True Heir, 3rd or 2nd in line for the throne, yada, yada, yada.
This turned out not to be true in any particular. Oma was not royalty, just Upper Crust. Her father was the Director of the Frankfurt Opera. She came to the U.S. in the '20s as a model, and got married in 1935. My Opa had ditched her and Dad for mysterious reasons, possibly political, somewhere between 1938 and 1940. He was born in Baltimore, MD and was at least 3rd generation American. Dad wasn't a Prince. I was no Princess, just a kid with an overdeveloped sense of Noblesse Oblige. I was (you'll pardon the pun) a royal pain in the patootie. When I found out how miserably untrue my fantasy was, at first I was peeved, then relieved. Now I wouldn't trade places with Fergie, er, the Dutchess of York, even for all that money she gets. Yuck.
So anyway, there we were in Laguna in the '60s.
I was a goodietwoshoes/bookworm/teacherspet/etc. As the oldest girl out of 6 kids, I did some of the "little mother" stuff and felt properly martyred about it. My big brother did a lot more work than I did, but complained less. I went to St. Catherine of Sienna Catholic School for first grade. The nuns there were not the legendary tyrants weilding sharpened rulers and vented paddles I've heard so much about. The most horrid of punishments for us first graders was to be sent to do a page of coloring in a third grade classroom. Horrors. My big brother was too mischevious for them, plus having babies left and right gave my Mom second thoughts about Catholicism, so I didn't have to go back to find out what they did to second graders.
Second through fourth were at Aliso Elementary. My school experience was pretty placid, like being in a storybook from the period. The other kids teased me fairly mercilessly, but I took to hiding out in the library, or having a tummy ache in the nurse's office. When life at home was crazed enough that I wasn't getting enough sleep, I'd catch up on the nurse's office cot. That was back in 1966, when there was an actual nurse hanging around, and she'd even give you aspirin if you wanted it.
At home, I was getting the long end of a belt more often and severely than I liked. My ballet lessons were cancelled even though my brother was getting a scholarship. Obviously I was going to be too big to dance, and it cost money we didn't have, etc. My Oma would probably have paid for them if asked, but it was all part of the misery. Did I mention I was into the martyr thing?
And I started seeing dead people, like in The Sixth Sense, only I didn't see how they died displayed on them and I mostly wasn't afraid of them. Only of the mean ones, and I'd just push them through the Big Light fast, before they could hurt me. I thought I was murdering people. We lived three blocks from the local hospital. It took having a neighbor's house two blocks from us burn down for my mom to figure out what was going on. Fortunately, she didn't pound me into the ground or send me to get my delusions removed. I learned that it's called Crossing Over, and that for some reason, it's my job to help some people do it if they're having trouble with it.
Around 1968, my parents were doing the Hippy thing. Mom started making jewelry and Dad quit his job as a cop. Love beads, Indian prints, incense and mysticism pervaded the house. I hung out at Mystic Arts World and wished I was older. I wanted to be 16 and go to San Francisco. I was 9. My parents had a friend come over to our house and I knew as soon as I saw her that that was what I was supposed to be when I grew up. Her name is Morning Glory, and we still are friends.
In fourth grade, I was friends with Tana Cuevas, who came to Laguna from Chapala, Mexico, near Guadalajara, to learn to speak English. The August afterward, I spent the month with her family in Chapala. We would play with her friends during the day, and into the night on sundays, listening to the music in the plaza. The boys crushed colored eggshells full of confetti into my hair and Tana just laughed.
My family moved to a different part of Laguna that summer, so I had fifth and sixth grades at Top of the World School, where we were all ever so sophisticated. Hippidom moved into a suburban tract house. My best friend's mom painted pictures of mums for the Art-that-Matches-the-Furniture crowd. I started taking French in Jr. High because Spanish was so common. I got harrassed less by the other kids. They did roll their eyes when I announced I was a witch. I didn't really know what it even meant for another five years.
During my freshman year in high school, my best friend was killed in a car accident. My mom had, at the last moment, recinded permission to go out with my friend, saving my life. When I tried suicide because I was depressed at having my life ripped in half, she stopped me again. That's when I started getting close with my mom. Of course it didn't mean I was close enough to tell her when I got raped in my sophomore year. I figured she's be mad at me for getting into the situation in the first place. It was ugly. I'll spare the details.
The rest of high school was pretty cool. I worked on the Yearbook staff from my sophomore year through senior, intimidating the Faculty Advisor enough that he took on editorship so I wouldn't have it. Some of his aesthetic decisions were rather jarring to me. I took more French, some German, history, psychology, dance, lit., etc.
Being a 1976/Bicentennial Year graduate had an odd feeling. We weren't as hip as the Real Boomers who were 5 - 10 years older than us, nor did we really fuel the Disco thing. I think Disco was a Young Republican reaction to the '60s scene. On the other hand, being in college at the end of the '70s was a blast. Post-"sexual revolution" and pre-AIDS timing meant there was time and space to have a lot of fun exploring sex. So I did. The scariest disease it was possible to get was herpes, but I lucked out in that the worst thing I ever got was yeast. I met, fell ass-over-teakettle in love, and settled down with Krys just in the nick of time.
I was ostensibly a psychology major, but took philosophy, sociology, fencing, literature, etc. I stopped taking French and dance, which now I regret. I ran out of money for school about the time I was slacking off anyway because I was In Love. I lived with Krys and job hunted, worked at Marty's Hotdogs on Mission St. in Santa Cruz (now a Falafel House) and at A&W on Ocean St. (now a Togo's). I lived with my Mom on her acreage in Mendocino County for a while, and the summer of '79 Krys lived up there with me.
Somewhere during all this, Krys's parents asked whether we were going to get married. Wow! What a fun idea! We could have a party and everything! I went to a fabric store that was going out of business and bought many bolts of fabric, then went to Hart's for silver trim. I got "Chinese mary janes" in blue satin from Hot Feet in Capitola, and a beautiful champaigne glass from Dell-Williams. We spent maybe $500, that is, most of our savings, on our tiny wedding in Krys's parents back yard. I did most of the putting stuff together by myself with tons of help from Krys's Mom, (and a wonderful lemon poundcake wedding cake from his Aunt Judy) but forgot to make dinner reservations. So we went out for Mongolian Barbeque.
Krys worked for MacDonnell-Douglas, and I went to El Camino College, and we did wizardy, Pagan, Renaissance Faire things. We lived in Redondo Beach and took Meeting Day Anniversary vacations in Santa Cruz, often finishing the trips with visits to David & Cecilia. In 1983, I got pregnant in February, but it was Not To Be. We decided in November to actively try for a baby, and Robin was born the following August.
I was tired of living at the fringe of L.A. and had told Krys when we got married that I wanted to come back to Santa Cruz. After 6 years down there, we moved to Felton. Robin was 18 months old and Krys and I were going through our Saturn return. (Saturn went retrograde during that time, so it crossed our natal positions 3 times that year!) I got my first ever bout of poison oak, after having been immune all my life, and somewhere in there we went to Colorado for Thanksgiving.
Within a month of moving to Felton, Circle Dragonmist formed. It took almost a year for us to decide to find a name, which we did when we decided to apply for membership in Covenant of the Goddess. The Circle Dragonmist page in the Paganism section of the Draigsffau site grew out of our trying to describe what we were about to friends even before we moved north again, evolved through being our Statement of Practice for CoG, and has periodically been reviewed and fine tuned over the years.
I always seem to feel like I'm accomplishing less than I used to do, but realistically, it's more that the things I do change over time. In 1993 I did quite a lot of textile painting. For 3 1/2 years I edited a small 'zine called Razing the Stakes. In 1996 I began to learn about the Web. In 1998 I took somewhere around 2000 photographs as we traipsed around the British Isles.
Meanwhile I've had a second child and thus was forced to deal with my distaste for hospitals. I've survived (so far) bringing up 2 boys, now ages 12 and 16. I've done no worse a job than my mother, and in some ways better. I've kept a coven alive for 15 years. I've battled depression.
Now here I am, in my 40s, having the hubris to jump into professional Web design, even after the dot-com nosedives and in spite of all the bouncy, bright-eyed young things bringing young tastes with them. I've never worked for a corporation, but I'm willing to screw my courage together and give it a try. Why? Because I need to keep on making beauty manifest. Because I'm opinionated about the quality (and lack of of it) that I see on the Web. Because my demographic has more money to burn than the bright young things and shouldn't be ignored. Because the Web won't go away. So I'm growing, and stretching, and changing shape again.
So there you have it.
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